Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Welcome to the first in our series on The Burgmüller Studies. Burgmüller was a wonderful composer who wrote pieces that are accessible to less advanced students, yet offer absolutely wonderful musical content. I always encourage students who have progressed beyond the most basic level to explore these pieces because they are beautiful compositions that can help you further your development as a pianist.

Today we are going to discuss the first piece in this series: La Candeur (or as it translates to English, “Frankness”).

One of the most important parts of developing as a musician is being able to read music and being able to read it quickly. Memorizing the notes on the staff is an integral part of progressing musically and I’m going to share a few tips that will make this easier for you.

There are many ways people go about learning notes and the most popular seems to be the acronym approach. You’ve probably heard the one for the lines from the treble clef from bottom to top:

Fine
Does
Boy
Good
Every

The spaces are pretty easy, they spell the word FACE (again bottom to top):

E
C
A
F

The bass clef lines are::

Always
Fine
Do
Boys
Good

And the bass clef spaces are:

Grass
Eat
Cows
All

But what about the ledger lines once you go above or below the staff? You can see that this system breaks down very quickly. It gets incredibly complicated to refer to these acronyms on the spot; it’s just not practical.

Fortunately there is a much easier way to learn your notes without using acronyms. It involves simply learning the first seven letters of the alphabet:

G
F
E
D
C
B
A

If you can learn to say these letters frontwards and backwards quickly you are on your way to reading notes. That’s it! This applies to both the treble and the bass clef. You can start with middle C:

The reason for this is that middle C is in the middle between the treble and bass clefs. So, it’s easy to locate. From here you simply go either up or down through the alphabet. If you are counting up you simply go from C to D to E to F to G and when you reach G you simply go back to the first letter of the alphabet, A and start over again. The same applies for going down. Once you reach A you continue with the last letter of the musical alphabet, G and count down through the alphabet note by note. You only have to use seven letters and if you familiarize yourself with them you will no longer have any problems figuring out notes.

If you’re concerned about going backwards, memorize the low space A in the bass clef. That way it’s very easy to simply count up through the alphabet from there. If you keep practicing this and familiarize yourself with this technique you will find it much easier to read notes than using the acronym method.

We received this question from Luis. He wondered if it would be best to find a piano that has never been played. This is really a interesting question which we will explore today.

Does a piano benefit from being played? To some extent, yes. If a piano is neglected, some of the parts can get jammed up with dirt and dust, key bushings may harden and other action parts may eventually begin to have problems functioning smoothly. There is also the element of discovery. A piano that is played and serviced regularly will receive the attention required to keep it playing on a high level.

On the other hand, if you play the piano frequently, some parts will eventually wear out with use and will need to be replaced. So, there is no absolute in regards to how much a piano should be played.

The ideal situation would be moderate, regular use like having a car you only drive once a month. You might take it around the block every once in awhile, change the oil every three months, fill it with gas, and keep it in the garage. This may not be the most fulfilling way to enjoy your car. But it will age very slowly! Likewise, if you barely play your piano and have it serviced regularly,(assuming a stable environment) it is going to stay in ideal condition but your enjoyment of the instrument will be limited.

If a piano is in your home you should play it as much as you want. Understand that using your piano a great deal is going to require more maintenance (such as more frequent tunings and eventually replacing some action parts). However, the fear of having to invest money in your piano over time shouldn’t prevent your enjoyment of the instrument. Even with intensive practice, you should get many years of service out of a new or newly rebuilt piano before any major work is required.

This might sound like a crazy proposition to a lot of you but we get calls everyday from people looking to get rid of pianos they simply can’t keep anymore or don’t want. You might think that there would be people out there who would want any piano but it’s not that simple. Getting rid of a piano you don’t want can actually be a real challenge.

Now if you have a piano in good condition – one that plays well enough and has a decent finish – you can probably find someone who is willing to pay at least a small amount for it or at least take it as a donation. But even then it might be a challenge to find it a new home.

If you have an older upright piano that is in pretty bad condition you might think that somebody out there might want it to fix up and you can avoid taking it to the dump. Sadly, in some cases this is the only thing you can do. Finding a home for a sub-standard piano is going to be a real challenge and unfortunately many pianos are taken to the dump every year. In some cases this might be your only option. Rebuilding a piano costs thousands of dollars and if you have a piano that has the potential to be worth only a small amount, it’s going to be very hard to find a home for it.

Now let’s say you have a piano that has potential and can play OK – what are your options? If you don’t want to go through the process of selling the piano yourself and nobody is willing to take it in on consignment then you can try an auction house. Many times they will haul your piano away for you and put it on auction. If it sells you may get some money for it and not have to worry about that piano taking up room in your home anymore.

I have known many people who have started with one instrument and then for one reason or another decided to switch instruments. At some point these people came to the realisation that they were destined to play something else and they made the transition. The question is, is it ever too late to switch instruments?

This really depends upon your situation, your expectations and the nature of the switch. For example, I’ve known a number of fine violinists who switched to the Viola with great success. In some cases it was because there was a greater market for viola. Others might have simply fallen in love with the rich sound of the viola. This transition is not that radical as the foundations for the violin and viola are very similar.

If you are thinking about making a radical change from one instrument to the next – such as trombone to guitar – it could be a much harder switch and something you should consider carefully. Your fit with the instrument is important, but you should have realistic expectations about what is possible when making such a big change in the instrument you play.

I’ve seen cases where some musicians will have gone to conservatory for one instrument but always played another instrument as a secondary instrument. They may come to the realisation that their true love is their secondary instrument! Switching could be the best decision as long as they are realistic.

I have known people who have decided to switch instruments to something they are not familiar with at all and it has presented great challenges. For example, if you played the clarinet for most of your life and find that there aren’t bands or orchestras you want to play with, it could be incredibly difficult to switch to an instrument like the piano in your twenties and develop serious repertoire and fluid technique. But if that’s where your passions lie, you must follow your dream. You can certainly become an accomplished player but it is unlikely you would develop a career as a concert pianist.

As long you are realistic with your goals you should follow your heart and pursue whatever instrument you are interested in. The good news is that anything you learn in music translates to other things. If you have a background in singing you will have a foundation for music already in place so learning another instrument will not be nearly as difficult as it would be for someone who has had no music training.

Today we have a question from Umberto, who asks, “How do you approach pedaling in the Moonlight Sonata? Do you pedal throughout all of it?”

These are excellent questions. In fact, yes, you use pedal in some parts rather sparingly, other parts very generously, but you use it throughout the whole piece in different ways. Of course the different movements have different requirements, but we’re going to focus today on the first movement, the famous melodic first movement.

So first of all, just a little primer. Whenever you’re using the pedals on the piano you want to keep your your heels firmly on the floor. You never want to put your pedal like this because it’s noisy. So you keep the heel on the floor, and then the ball of the foot is how you control best. Always keep it in contact, because if you go from above, once again you get noise. All pedals are very different on pianos. You have to experiment to find how you could play it quietly and effectively, because they all release the dampers at different points. One of the first things you want to try out when you’re playing over a concert is how the pedal responds on the instrument.

So getting to the Moonlight Sonata. As with any music, the pedal changes wherever the harmonies change. So if you were to play this piece in chords, each time the chord changes . . . and notice the pedal always comes up exactly on the beat but goes down right after the beat. So that’s the secret of pedaling. The pedal always comes up exactly on the change of harmony and goes right back down again. So if I play it now not in chords, but as it’s written, and with the soft pedal, the una corda pedal, depressed the entire time, you get this.

The reason for changing the pedal, coming up on the pedal exactly on the beat, is otherwise harmonies blur. If you were to play the pedal and put it down on the beat instead of up on the beat, you’d end up with this.

I can’t even do it. It’s so hard. I’m so trained. I’m gonna try it again. I’m gonna try to play the pedal wrong for you.

Yeah, that’s also not connected. I haven’t experimented with playing pedal wrong. It’s a hard thing to do. Any of you who are a pianist accustomed to using the pedal, try it how hard it is to play it wrong. So get in the habit of always coming up at the change of harmonies and right back down again so you get that smooth transition, and if you’re not sure where the harmonies change, break the music down to chords and it becomes very obvious for you.

Believe it or not there have been a number of scams perpetrated in the new and used piano market over the years that have tricked both buyers and sellers into dishonest sales. There are probably way more than five scams out there but I thought I would share some of the most common ones we have come across in today’s market.

The interested buyer who never comes back – but takes something with them

I ran across this scam years ago and it was being perpetrated by a couple who would take advantage of private sellers. The scam goes like this:

One person in the couple would call on an ad someone placed about selling their piano. They would say they were interested and come over to see the piano right away. After a few minutes they would offer to buy the piano and give the seller a few hundred dollars as a “down payment” for the piano. Before they would leave though, they would make sure to take a part of the piano with them – perhaps the fallboard was scratched and they told the seller they wanted to start repairs on it. Days or weeks would pass and the “buyer” would never come back, but the seller was stuck with a piano that was now missing a crucial piece that couldn’t easily be replaced – which would de-value the piano by a significant amount.

Later on, the seller would get a call from the other person in the couple – making sure never to reference the original “buyer” – saying that they saw the ad for the piano a while ago and wanted to know if they were still selling the piano. By now you can see where this is headed. The scam would end with the seller offering the piano to the new buyer for much less because of the missing parts. The seller would never know they had been scammed and the devious couple would get a piano for much less than it’s worth.

The auction piano

Many people seek pianos from auction houses hoping for a bargain. Often at auction houses, you will not be able to inspect the piano closely – you won’t be able to look inside except from a distance. You will have to take their word on the condition of the piano. It’s a gamble with potentially big payoff.

The scam that has come up in today’s market is misrepresenting the piano. It’s not necessarily on the part of the auction house. But someone will use a popular name (Steinway is the most likely) to drive up the price of the piano. Just putting the Steinway decal on the front of a piano can potentially increase its value dramatically because people think they are buying a Steinway.

So you bid on a piano, you win, you’re very excited to own a Steinway for way less than what it’s typically worth, you get it delivered to your home and then first discover that it’s not a Steinway! Someone has put a Steinway decal on a lesser piano and you are stuck with this instrument.

The way to avoid this type of scam is to research the auction house, ask as many questions as you can about the piano being sold, and know the design differences to distinguish between piano brands.

This leads us to the next scam:

Changing the name (decal) on a piano

Replacing the decal on the piano is a necessity if you’re refinishing a fallboard. But did you know that anyone buy any decal for any piano brand online? This is a legitimate need for piano rebuilders and refinishers.

The scam here is buying a decal that’s either completely wrong or “technically” wrong and putting it on the front of a piano.

Completely wrong would be putting a name like Steinway on a piano that is clearly not a Steinway. Once you open it up it’s obvious it’s not the correct piano.

Technically wrong would be taking the name of a company that technically manufactured the piano and putting their higher line name on the front of it. I’ve seen this a number of times with Howard pianos. Howard pianos were bought by Baldwin in the middle of the 20th century. Baldwin offered these pianos as lower line instruments – selling for much less than their higher priced Baldwin artist series counterparts. They would say “Howard” on the fallboard and on the side in small letters would be, “From the House of Baldwin”. Unscrupulous business people will put the Baldwin name right in the front misrepresenting the instrument.

Technically the piano is manufactured by Baldwin but it is not a true Baldwin, it’s a Howard. The seller could easily sell the piano for much more money and trick an unsuspecting buyer into purchasing a lower line piano while they are thinking they are getting something worth much more.

A completely fake piano

This is a scam that is incredibly hard to spot but is rare to find in the piano world. The scam involves going to great lengths to hide the true manufacturer of a piano in order to sell something for much more money than it’s worth.

I ran into this scam only once and it nearly got me!

Someone contacted me about a Steinway concert grand they were looking at purchasing. They sent me pictures and I went over them and initially thought that they had come across a legitimately good deal. The piano looked to be in great shape, the scale design looked right, and the decals and plate had the correct logos on them. So where was the scam?

Steinert is a company that used to produce pianos in the United States and they produced pianos incredibly similar in scale design to Steinway pianos. They look almost identical to Steinway pianos from a distance. Steinert pianos – while good pianos – are not worth anything near the value of a true Steinway piano because of the power of the Steinway name since Steinert went out of business decades ago.

This particular seller had actually gone to extraordinary lengths and replaced the Steinert logo cast into the the plate of the concert grand with the Steinway logo! This is a very time consuming and complex process that would take expertise to accomplish since they had to smelt metal to make the plate appear to be a Steinway. The potential payoff though would be in the tens of thousands of dollars.

So how did I figure this scam out?

Well a lot of text is put onto plates and it would be nearly impossible to replace all of it. After closer inspection I found that the text along the plate didn’t exactly match that of a true Steinway. Steinway pianos have specific patents cast into the plate at various places. Steinert pianos have different text cast into their plates that are unique to them. I realized that the information engraved in the plate was from a Steinert piano, not a Steinway.

A very clever scam and a very good one but still able to be solved with a little detective work.

Misrepresenting the county of origin for a piano

This is one of the most common things I run into in the piano market today and it’s something that all buyers need to be aware of. This is especially common in new pianos.

The “scam” is not so much a scam as a way to coerce a potential buyer to think their piano was manufactured in a different country than it actually is.

For example: You see a piano in a store with a European or American name, the salesperson tells you that the piano was “designed” in Europe or America and has connections to major European or American brands but cleverly avoids the topic of where the piano was actually manufactured – which in most cases is China or Indonesia. Sometimes they will claim that the piano is an American piano assembled in China or that it’s a German piano assembled in Asia. This is more than stretching the truth – it is false information.

This is something that can be avoided by simply asking where the piano was manufactured. Any reputable seller should tell you the truth. There is nothing wrong with a piano manufactured in China or Indonesia but you should be aware of this when buying the piano. You should not be under the assumption that you are buying something you aren’t.